Using a van as an aerial

Jul 16, 2025 Last reply: 1 year ago 20 Replies

I recently spent the night in my van camped in a woodland glade and decided to try out an idea i had been thinking about for shortwave broadcast reception.



The receiver was an Eddystone EC10 which I recently restored, it has a 'floating' aerial input circuit of nominally 50 ohms. I connected the 'earth' socket to the receiver casing and the 'aerial' socket to a length of wire in the conventional way.



Instead of hanging up the wire, I laid it along the ground under the van, so it had greater capacitive coupling to the ground than it did to the van. The receiver was on the wooden 'kitchen worktop' in the van, so it had greater capacitance coupling to the van than to the ground outside. This meant that, in effect, one terminal of the aerial input circuit was connected to ground and the other was connected to the van - so the van was acting as the aerial.



The results above 5 Mc/s were quite acceptable, with excellent reception from medium-to-strong stations and hardly any interference. Below 5 Mc/s, where the capacitive coupling was ineffective, the bands were almost silent.



If I had used an earthing stake and electrically joined the receiver earth to the van body, I might have had even better results.



Did you detect any cats?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Did you detect any cats?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

No, the results were quite good but they weren't Purrr-fect.

What's the capacitance of a van to ground?

What's the relative humidity at the time of measurement?

No idea and no way of telling. The site is 60 miles away and it has rained since.

The van is approximately 4.8 metres x 1.8 metres and has a ground clearance of 30 cm - so the 'capacitor' has a plate area of 8.46 sq m and a spacing of 0.30 m. If we assume the ground to be a perfect conductor and air to have a dielectric constant of 1, this gives a capacitance of 255 pF.

The capacitance between van and ground will shunt the signal; for best results at lower frequencies it is the capacitance between the wire and ground that needs to be maximised.

Do you think that matters?

The van will shield the wire, especially with dry soil. So drape the wire away from the van, not under it.

Better yet would be a ground rod.

The van capacitance can be tuned away.

If the wire is acting as a ground, then it should not matter whether it is under or along side the van. Using the whole van as an antenna seems like a good idea. It should be very wideband. John

I think you have misunderstood what I was doing, I was using the van as an aerial and the aerial wire as an earth. Because I didn't have a ground rod handy, I just laid the wire on the ground and relied on its capacitance to earth - above 5Mc/s that seemed to work.

It just happened that the receiver was inside the van - i.e. inside its own aerial, but that didn't matter because it was only responding to the difference in potential between two input terminals and didn't care what each one was connected to.

Am 16.07.25 um 11:18 schrieb Liz Tuddenham:

HB9CVQ has made a lot of measurements on that, and also HFSS simulations IIRC.

See for example:

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73, Gerhard DK4XP

Am 17.07.25 um 19:32 schrieb Gerhard Hoffmann:

PS I can help with translations from German or connect you to Andy.

Perhaps not. As noted at

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, "The relative permittivity of air changes with temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure". According to the ref (25) quoted, it's "1.4×10^−6/%RH".

I thought it would have been a lot higher. Although pure water is a good insulator, moisture in the air will have dissolved various gases which would increase conductivity, such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides. I have no idea how much of an effect they would have, if any.

The wire has capacitance to the van and capacitance to the earth. The wire-van capacitance reduces the signal level and increases the wire's impedance as the effective antenna.

Things will get worse in sand or dry soil.

I understood that.

The challange is to push microamps into the receiver's antanna connector.

What will matter is the conductivity of the earth that the wire is laying on, and wet helps there.

The distance between the conductor and the underside of the van floor was 30 cms, the distance between the conductor and the soil was the thickness of the PVC insulation - less than a millimetre. The ratio of capacitances to the wire was overwhelmingly 'earthy'.

Yes, but this was a clearing at the bottom of a wooded hillside with mulch for the floor. It had dried out a bit but, even in the height of Summer, there is still condensation from dew in the early morning, so nothing in a forest is ever truly dry.

There was a sort of fad once, in Popular Electronics, for surface-sheet-resistance commmunications. One used an audio amp and a couple of ground rods as the transmitter and another pair of rods and an amp as the receiver. A sort of substitute for ham radio.

Dipole fields fall off fast so range was short.

I never got a ham license; I don't like to talk to people and sine waves are boring anyhow. But I did make an earth-potential receiver and heard all sorts of weird sounds, sort of like VLF atmospherics.

A photomultiplier is fun too. Listen to light. Nowadays with so many LEDs it would be more interesting. I wonder what the Salesforce Tower sounds like.

[...]

In desperation I tried to use that system for a communications link many years ago. It was a stop-gap measure because the proposed radio system had turned out to be hopeless.

The ground-resistance method also turned out to be hopeless. The area had PME (Protective Multiple Earthing) on the power distribution system in the village, so each premises and every pole had its own earth rod connected to the neutral. The voltage drop along the neutral created large earth currents with harmonics extending well into the audio band.

I might have got it to work by modulating the audio onto some sort of above-audio carrier wave, but there wasn't time to try it and I suspect the interference harmonics went well into the low radio frequencies.

The problem was eventually solved by a VHF radio link.

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